Mixed diets

My partner and I eat the same Lunch and Dinner when I’m dieting. The only difference is I eat fewer snacks outside of those main meals. How many calories are you and your partner eating? Are you gaining and losing it after? Is your partner losing and then gaining again?

Hey - I kind of have this going on at my house - only it's annoyingly more complicated. My husband is an ectomorph with high blood pressure and 10" of height on me. He is also a pescatarian. I have iron anemia and low blood pressure, and I *hate fish.* We both work and have very busy schedules.

We get around the required differences in diet by recovering a lot of what we need to be "individual" in our diets at lunch time. I eat a lot of red meat in my lunch and he tends to order fish. We're away from each other and either pack our own lunches or go out to eat and order what we need to make up the differences we know will occur at dinner.

For dinner, I tend to cook vegetarian dishes we can both enjoy, (curried chickpeas and brown rice, quiches, veggie lasagne, etc) and supplement with our own left-over meats from the fridge as needed. It involves a bit more thinking ahead for both of us than it used to, but over a few months of tweaking, we've managed to work things out so that neither of us is miserable or moving away from our individual goals.

When I was with my ex, we just each managed our own food and meals. He body builds, so was always either bulking or cutting and has stayed very much in the “boiled chicken and broccoli” diet mindset. He also always worked second or third shift, so we rarely had meals together anyway. So we just had separate shelves and cabinets in the kitchen and did our own thing. It was probably the most harmonious part of our relationship, in retrospect.

Same food but vary the serving size and relative portions. For my family They might do pasta with a veggie rich sauce and a meatball. My kids and husband with have a much higher portion of their plat filled with pasta and a small amount of sauce . I might have just sauce with the protein. If I needed to add additional calories I could add more meat to that plate and a nice helping of butter or cheese added on top.

In the same way adding bread and butter to a veg/protein heavy meal, or a side of another carb can be an easy way to add calories.

In general keeping high calorie sauces to the side and cooking the protein separately is the way to go. One more example would be a peanut satay. I could cook a load of veggies stirfry style and have a separate soy/ peanut sauce that I add is varying amounts to each portion. The calorie dense serving would also get a ample serving of rive to go along with it, where th low calorie might get a bed of lettuce or a spaghetti squash or cauliflower rice.